Why You Should Go on Your Book Tour Before Michi’s Review Hits

While enjoying a typical New York Sunday morning yesterday—coffee, two eggs on a roll, the Times, NPR—I had an unexpected moment of empathy for someone much, much richer than myself: Yann Martel, who reportedly got three million dollars for his new novel, “Beatrice and Virgil,” a Holocaust parable about a donkey and a monkey who meet a terrible fate at the hands of a taxidermist. Also about a writer who resembles Martel.

Oh, the corruption of riches, putting huge things like ideas in the minds of men and convincing them they are good.

I am sitting there, rereading Michiko Kakutani’s review (“misconceived and offensive”), wincing, laughing, biting my nails, marvelling at the power of the critic and also at the baseness of the critical pursuit, when I hear a voice, elegant, subtle, drifting from my Sony boombox (vintage 1994). It’s Yann Martel. He talks about what’s been keeping him busy: touring, writing letters to the Prime Minister of Canada, raising his eight-month-old baby boy. He talks about Obama and “Life of Pi.” He sounds handsome. I Google-image him. He is. All is going well. I am not feeling sorry for him. And then the interviewer pauses. She takes a breath, and asks: “Do you read your reviews?”

Here is the nightmare that follows:

Mr. MARTEL: Yes and no. It’s interesting, this book has been very divisive ‘cause there was a terrible review in the New York Times, a terrible review in the Washington Post and a terrible review in the San Francisco, I think it’s called the Chronicle, Im not sure.

HANSEN: Yes.

Mr. MARTEL: Then there was an extremely positive in other papers – the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I think it was called, a very good one in the Huffington Post, I think it’s called, which is interesting and perhaps to be expected. We are very cautious about the Holocaust, which of course we should be. But let’s compare it with war.

Saved! By switching the topic to what we should or should not feel comfortable saying or not saying about the Holocaust and war in general. An old trick. But I am not distracted from the horror of the sad smashed ego that’s just drifted out in a million little soundbytes. Not to besmirch the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the fact that it is name-dropped here as evidence of dissenting opinion is difficult to bear.

Later, I was talking to a friend about what I thought was the boldness of the interviewer’s question, and my friend pointed out, rightly, that because many of the big reviews appeared just before Martel was scheduled to do a lot of his press, interviewers were obliged to ask him about it—in a way, to ask him to justify a book that cost so much and was received so poorly, and, more to the point, a book that cost so much and was received so poorly about the Holocaust. I don’t know whether this is fair or not: I don’t think writers should be forced to explain their negative reviews, but I do think that if you tackle a subject like this, you should be prepared for intense scrutiny.

At least some interviewers did it with humor. On the TV program “The New York Times Close Up,” this question was put to Martel (I am paraphrasing), “The Martel-like character in your new book has given up on writing. After reading Michi’s review, did you wish you had done the same?”

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